Interestingly enough, I am not experiencing the slowdowns users like
Chris report. I am able to pull my entire 4 megabit line down with
minimal effort on the firewall. Granted, 5.3 uses a bit more CPU but
nothing too absurd. The test was run using two client PCs: one running
Azureus and an HTTP download from IBM, and the other running eXeem for a
total of maybe 80 or so streams. CPU use was in the low 20 percentiles
regardless of the HTTP download running or not. IIRC I believe the 4.3
release tree would run around 10-15% in similar tests. My firewall is a
266MHz Pentium (not PII) with 64MB RAM. A simple proportion would not
agree with the numbers others are experiencing. Perhaps it is an issue
with a particular NIC chipset or code optimization (586 vs 486)? I am
using sis and fxp.
Kevin